TerraSAR-X Mission Planning System: Automated Command Generation for Spacecraft Operations

On June 15, 2007, TerraSAR-X was successfully launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. On board TerraSAR-X, a high-resolution X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument is being operated as the primary payload. The user community requesting SAR products is composed of commercial and scientific partners as documented in a public-private-partnership agreement. The operations of the TerraSAR-X bus as well as payload operations are performed by the Mission Operations Segment (MOS). The Mission Planning System (MPS), which is a part of the MOS, has been designed to handle complex payload and standard bus operations in an automated manner. The purpose of this paper is to describe the concepts and the TerraSAR-X realization of the MPS.